American Women on the March
By SUZY MENKES
Published: May 3, 2010
NEW YORK — With noble heads held high and plain, determined faces, the women are on the march. They come from dead center, from the left and the right, an enfolding army in hazy black-and-white film footage, with a single message painted on a banner: Mr. President — How long must women wait for liberty?
This frisson of emotion is followed by a foot-tapping surge of freedom: figures in shimmy dresses with bobbed and crimped hair twinkling with crystals, jazz music and a graphic cityscape overhead.
“American Women: Fashioning a National Identity” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum is the story of how the heiresses to robber baron fortunes, dressed in bustled European ball gowns, morphed into sparky, sporty Gibson girls. Having won the battle for suffrage and planted the seeds of feminism, they matured from flapper to screen siren. Stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Rita Hayworth, camping it up in old movies, make this a show with a Hollywood ending.
Except that a final, digitalized room brings the story into the 21st century, with rotating projections of influential women from Serena Williams to Michele Obama.
“What was compelling was not the women — but their collective identities,” said Andrew Bolton, the exhibition’s curator. His task was to display historic pieces from 1890-1940 that the Met has received from the Brooklyn Museum, founded half a century earlier than the Costume Institute. Brooklyn is staging a parallel show of its master works.
The gala, set for Monday night and to be led by Anna Wintour of Vogue, Oprah Winfrey and Patrick Robinson, a chief designer at Gap, the event’s major sponsor, was intended as an action-packed, celebrity-filled event. From the hot air balloon suggesting a madcap sporty world to the yellow tulips spilling from white jugs on tables with wicker chairs, this was down-home simplicity (give or take the white piano destined to accompany the hip performer Lady Gaga.)
Getting the same sporty American energy into a static museum setting is not so easy, but with the powerful imagination of the set designer Nathan Crowley, each vignette in the show becomes symbolic of women’s progress.
“When I walk though the show, it seemed more than just fashion, it was the history of America,” Mr. Robinson said.
While Ms. Wintour said: “It looks so modern, the flapper girls could be wearing dresses from today.”
Hand-painted backdrops on a curve show a triptych of spring flowers, a seascape and russet leaves as the setting for the turn-of-the-century Gibson girls — long-limbed, gutsy ladies in linen tennis skirts, sailor swimsuits, side-saddle riding coats and ermine-trimmed skating outfits.
Mr. Crowley said the time-travel concept of 20th-century world fairs inspired him to recreate Stanford White’s Washington Square Arch of 1895, as well as Mrs. Astor’s ballroom in Newport, Rhode Island, for the million-dollar heiresses .
The other wizard of the show is the hairstylist Julien d’Ys, who excelled with the ever-changing styles — princess up-dos, Bohemian curls and Veronica Lake waterfalls. The coiffeurs alone identify the era and such hair artistry deserves a day to have an exhibition of its own.
The show really takes off with the Gibson girls, their full leg’o mutton sleeves no hindrance to what Mr. Bolton calls their “sporty, athletic, youthful ideas.”
“One of her major sources of emancipation was sport,” said the curator, who points out the shirt-waist dresses and bifurcated cycling skirts back in 1895 as the first hints of women adapting a male wardrobe.
The dulcet tones of Sarah Jessica Parker on the audio guide make history palatable.
The most beautifully realized room is the circle of Tiffany-style stained glass against which intricate dresses, freeing once-corseted bodies, and with hints of exoticism, showcase the beauties of the Brooklyn collection. A case of lacy shoes from the cobbler Yantorny, dresses by Liberty, Paul Poiret and Callot Soeurs (and even a 1910 jumpsuit) reflect the essence of the aesthetic period.
But the beating heart of this show is the march of the patriots, where Mr. Bolton said he deliberately aimed for videos enfolding the audience as in Bill Viola’s art.
The flappers are a fresh and frivolous outcome of emancipation, while the screen goddesses are an all-American cousinhood. In that display, there are movie clips of Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and of Rita Hayworth in 1946 as Gilda “putting the blame on Mame.” Those movies — even in black and white — bring to vibrant life the grand designer dresses, especially the Anna May Wong dragon embroidered gown created by the costume designer Travis Banton for “Limehouse Blues” in 1934.
In spite of the modern faces rotating on the final digital story board that brings “American Woman” up to 21st-century speed, what is missing from the exhibition are fashion crosscurrents to link past and present.
Mr. Bolton might have found designers today to express the spirit of his chosen categories: an Oscar de la Renta gown to fit with the new money heiresses in their Worth gowns; a current Asian-American designer beside Anna May Wong’s dress; a Ralph Lauren chemise to challenge the flappers; and the troubling beauty of Rodarte among the Bohemians.
And why not show the casual ease of Michael Kors or, indeed, jeans and T-shirts from the Gap, to project how sportswear became America’s dominant fashion force?
As Bob Fisher of the Gap put it: “When my parents started the business in 1969, they wouldn’t say they had a social mission at the time. But we did play an important role.”
The concept of the future growing from the past is the essence of a good fashion exhibition. Mr. Bolton and his team have done a fine job. Yet the show is missing that final link to American designers re-fashioning the future.
American Woman. Fashioning a National Identity. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Through Aug. 15.
